ADVENTURE - Expedition to the Lost City of Z - Read Sample Chapters

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Colonel Percy Fawcett and his Expedition into the Amazon Jungle in search of a Lost City

Mato Grosso in Portuguese means "dense forest" - a fitting name for the landlocked Brazilian state nearly three times the size of Texas. Until the second half of the present century, Indians were the only inhabitants of its nearly impenetrable rain forests, and few white men had attempted to chart its terrain.

Into this steaming wilderness filled with animal species still unfamiliar to zoologists and native tribes whose existence was not even suspected, three explorers dared to advance in April 1925. They would be facing poisonous snakes, flesh-eating fish, clouds of biting, stinging insects, and an uncertain welcome from the natives - all in pursuit of an elusive lost city known to them only by an enigmatic code name: "Z." Five weeks after leaving the capital, Cuiaba, the party's leader wrote home to his wife in England from the ominously named Dead Horse Camp (where his mount had died on a previous expedition): "We hope to get through this region in a few days.... You need have no fear of any failure." It was the last message ever received from the jungle explorer.

Penetrating the Veil

Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett had been obsessed with solving the mysteries of the Brazilian jungle for nearly two decades. He had been commissioned by the Bolivian government to survey its boundary with Brazil in the years 1906-09 and had returned to the forbidding wilderness popularly called "the green hell" several times in the years since then.

South America's Spanish conquerors had never found fabled El Dorado or the land of the warrior women known as Amazons, but stories about them would not die. In 1911 came the electrifying news of the discovery by an American, Hiram Bingham, of the lost city of the Incas, Machu Picchu, nestled in Peru's Andes Mountains.

There were other lost cities, natives kept telling Fawcett on his subsequent surveys and explorations. In Chile he heard of a still inhabited City of the Caesars, its streets paved in silver, its buildings roofed with gold. The inhabitants supposedly led a blissful existence under the rule of an enlightened king. Some magic property made it invisible to undesirable adventurers from outside. In Rio de Janeiro, Fawcett found a report of the long forgotten discovery in 1753 of the ruins of a monumental stone city; there was no record of it ever having been visited again.

Given a 10-inch tall figure carved of black basalt, Fawcett had it evaluated by a psychometrist, one who claims he can divine an object's origin by holding it. Undoubtedly, he was told, it came from the lost continent of Atlantis, taken along when its inhabitants had fled destruction to find refuge and build a great city in the Brazilian wilderness. Since the name was unknown, Fawcett called it -Z- for convenience. A civilization older than Egypt's waited to be uncovered.

"The existence of the old cities I do not for a moment doubt," Fawcett wrote in 1924, as he prepared for another expedition. "Between the outer world and the secrets of ancient South America a veil has descended"; he who penetrated that veil would advance knowledge of the past immeasurably. At age 57, Fawcett knew this would be his last chance to be that person.

Raising funds from various scientific societies and selling the story of his exploration and expected discoveries in advance to the North American Newspaper Alliance, Fawcett was ready for the grand adventure early in 1925. He would take with him only his 21 -year-old son, Jack, and a young friend named Raleigh Rimell. They would probably be gone until the end of the following year. But, if they didn't emerge from Brazil's "green hell," no rescue parties were to be sent. If Fawcett, with all his experience, couldn't survive, there was little hope for others. For that reason, he declined to give a precise route for his exploration.

Tantalizing Clues

In 1927 Fawcett's younger son, Brian, met a French traveler in Lima, Peru. En route across the continent by automobile, the Frenchman had encountered an old, sick, and apparently confused man along a road in Minas Gerais, a Brazilian state between Mato Grosso and the Atlantic. The man had said his name was Fawcett. Not having heard of the lost explorer, the Frenchman did not insist that the stranger join him.

Brian was unable to raise money for a rescue party and not until the following year did the North American Newspaper Alliance send a party under George Dyott to investigate Fawcett's disappearance. A native chieftain told Dyott that he had seen an older white man accompanied by two younger men, both lame. They were headed east, toward the Atlantic. For five days smoke from their camp fires could be seen, but thereafter there was no trace of them. Dyott returned with the belief that Fawcett and the two young men had been killed by the Indians, but the Colonel's family refused to accept this.

Four years later a Swiss trapper named Stefan Rattin emerged from the Mato Grosso with a tale that Colonel Fawcett was being held as a prisoner by Indians. Brian later learned that a half-white native boy claimed to be the son of his brother Jack. All such clues, including bones produced as those of Fawcett, were dead ends. The fate of his father, Brian sadly concluded, would remain a mystery; the riddle of "Z," forever unsolved.

"Whether we get through and emerge again or leave our bones to rot in there, one thing's certain," Colonel Fawcett had told Brian. "The answer to the engima of ancient South America and perhaps of the prehistoric world - may be found when those old cities are located and opened up to scientific research. That the cities exist, I know.

 

Colonel Percy Fawcett

 

The Disappearance of Colonel Percy Fawcett

Colonel Percy Fawcett was a famed explorer who disappeared after going into the wilderness of Brazil in 1925. He was an experienced land surveyor and had gone on several expeditions in the area before. However, his last expedition was in search of a lost and ancient city that Fawcett had   dubbed Z. Had Colonel Percy Fawcett stumbled onto knowledge of a place that the locals or some supernatural being did not want him to find or was he simply a victim of the native's hostility or the local wildlife?

Colonel Percy Fawcett was born in Devon, England in 1867. When he was nineteen years old, he joined the Royal Artillery. He remained a military man for the better portion of his adult life. However, he began learning how to survey land, as a way of seeking a different living. He was offered a job with the Royal Geographical Society in 1906.

The Royal Geographical Society wanted Colonel Percy Fawcett to survey some land in South America and establish borders there. The area he was meant to survey had no official borders, which was causing tension among the locals. Fawcett took the job. He wound up spending roughly the next three years surveying areas of Bolivia and Brazil.

While in South America, Colonel Percy Fawcett took great care to get to know the natives and to treat them with respect. He had noticed that they were very hostile to outsiders and would attack freely. Percy avoided being attacked several times, by being very careful with the natives and exchanging gifts with them. Not all members of his expeditions escaped such a fate, however.

Colonel Percy Fawcett also became very familiar with South America's natural hazards. The terrain in the area was often unforgiving and he and the men of his expeditions did find themselves navigating rough terrain and dangerous rivers, at times. And, of course, there were the animals of the South American rainforests. Bulls, wild boars, anacondas, giant spiders (reportedly) and parasites are just a few of the dangerous animals that the men had to brave.   

In 1909, Colonel Percy Fawcett ceased his work for the Royal Geographical Society. He also left South America so that he could go fight in World War I. After World War I, he left the military and began to conduct expeditions in South America with funding from interested businesses. After a time, he began to find what he thought were clues to the location of a lost city in the jungles of Brazil. He became convinced that the city, Z, existed and that he knew the location of it.

In 1925 Percy decided to set out on an expedition to find "Z." He brought along his eldest son, Jack and Jack's friend. They began the mission into Brazil with a few assistants. On May 29, 1925, they sent the assistants back as they entered the more dangerous parts of the area. Colonel Percy Fawcett gave the assistants a letter to give to his wife. This was the last that was ever seen or heard of the three men. No evidence of what happened to them has been discovered.

As with many disappearances, many people claimed to have seen Colonel Percy Fawcett after he disappeared and there are many theories as to what happened to him. Some believe that he found his city and lived out the rest of his days there among the natives. Others believe that the natives attacked and killed the three men. Then, of course, there are those who believe that the terrain or the local wildlife got the better of them. At this point, there is no way of knowing which, if any, of these theories are true.

Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) -- With film rights sold to Paramount Pictures, Brad Pitt to produce and star, and a reported first printing of 125,000 copies, here’s a book to be reckoned with.

Yet “The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon” is distinguished foremost by the fine writing and research of author David Grann, a scribe for the New Yorker magazine.

Grann relates the exploits and disappearance of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, “the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose.” He displayed amazing endurance in the face of jungle horrors, among which the chief may well be the bugs I’ll use to punctuate parenthetically, to wit:

(“The sauba ants that could reduce the men’s clothes and rucksacks to threads in a single night.”)

After a string of successful expeditions in the Amazon region, Fawcett set out at age 57 from Hoboken, New Jersey, in January 1925 to find proof of what he believed to be a civilization “so old and sophisticated it would forever alter the Western view of the Americas.”

(“The ticks that attached like leeches.”)

He vanished, and such was his fame that for decades more than a hundred parties entered the jungle to try to learn his fate, while novelists and others tried to imagine how he fared. A screenplay titled “Find Colonel Fawcett” provided “the extremely loose basis for the 1941 movie ‘Road to Zanzibar,’ with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.”

(“The red, hairy chiggers that consumed human tissue.”)

James Bond

Grann mounts his own expedition, revealing himself to be utterly unsuited to the task in a funny encounter in a New York camping store. “I can do this, I thought, piling several of the most James Bond-like things into my basket. Finally, the salesman said, ‘You’ve never camped before, have you?’”

("The cyanide-squirting millipedes.")

Through Fawcett’s granddaughter, Grann obtains the colonel’s diaries and logbooks for almost every year from 1906 to 1921. From these and extensive research, he combines a colorful narrative of Fawcett’s early life, military career, jungle treks, theories and even conversations with a biography of an extraordinary man and an overview of the last great and highly competitive age of exploration.

(“The parasitic worms that caused blindness.”)

Polar Rivalry

On one expedition, Fawcett took along James Murray, the great polar scientist who accompanied Ernest Shackleton on his Antarctic expedition. Fawcett “resented the hold that polar explorers had on the public’s imagination and the extraordinary funding they received.” Murray did poorly in the jungle.

(“The berne flies that drove their ovipositors through clothing and deposited larval eggs that hatched and burrowed under the skin.”)

For the last third of the book, chapters alternate between Grann’s 2005 expedition into the Amazon region in search of evidence of Fawcett or the City of Z and earlier searches throughout the 20th century, including those of the explorer’s son Brian in the 1950s.

(“Nothing, though, was more hazardous than the mosquitoes. They transmitted everything from malaria to ‘bone-crusher’ fever to elephantiasis to yellow fever.”)

Did Grann find the lost city, the counterpart of conquistadors’ tales of El Dorado, the refutation of years of firm belief that the Amazon “for all its fauna and flora, is inimical to human life,” especially a large sophisticated civilization? It’s worth reading every page of this marvelous book to find out.

“The Lost City of Z” is published by Doubleday (339 pages, $27.50)

I am waiting in anticipation for Amazon Adventure by Ben Hammott to be completed.. I have read the two advance chapters on the book's website and thoroughly enjoyed them. At last a book that takes the reader to the Lost City. Here is the link for those who want to find out more: http://www.fawcettadventure.com

 

 

THEOSOPHY, Vol. 42, No. 4, February, 1954
(Pages 158-164; Size: 20K)
(Number 59 of a 59-part series)

ANCIENT LANDMARKS

THE MYSTERY OF MATTO GROSSO

STUDENTS of H. P. Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine are familiar with the theosophical teaching about the racial and national evolution of the human family on this globe, and her prediction that in the twentieth century discoveries will be made that will upset the notions of many a man of science. Of particular interest, therefore, is an article that appeared in the January 1933 issue of Blackwood's Magazine, "The Lost City of My Quest," by Colonel P. H. Fawcett, with the following editorial note by the publisher:

When Colonel Fawcett set out in 1925 on the expedition into the unexplored interior of Brazil from which he has failed to return, he hoped to find a large ruined city of the remote past. In this article, written not long before his departure, he describes the original discovery of that city.

While twenty years later, in 1953, Colonel Fawcett is still missing, his letters, manuscripts, and other records have been collected and published by his son, Brian Fawcett, in a volume replete with stories of adventure, of ghosts, magic and voodooism, and of the customs and practices generally of the aboriginal tribes of South America. (Lost Trails, Lost Cities, by Col. P. H. Fawcett. Funk & Wagnalls, New York, 1953. 332 pages, $5.00.)

The story related in both article and book concerns the history and fate of primeval races that peopled the high plateau regions of Matto Grosso, in Brazil. In the latter part of the sixteenth century, goes the legend, one Moribeca, half-Portuguese, half-Indian, who lived most of his life with the natives, displayed before the world such a wealth of gold, silver and precious stones, as to fill with envy the greedy Europeans. As the Portuguese authorities failed to obtain by trickery the secret of this wealth from either Moribeca or his son, numerous expeditions, some numbering as many as 1400 men, set out, only to disappear forever, as though they had been swallowed up by the wilderness.

In the year 1743, however, a native of Minas Geraes was fired to make a search for the lost mines of Moribeca. His party consisted of a few Portuguese, Indians, and Negro slaves. After ten years of hardship and wandering, whiLe seeking a way out of the wilderness, the party discovered, quite by accident, what seemed to be the long-sought object of their labors. While scouting for food, they were led by a deer through a deep crevice in a precipice. Gaining the summit, they stood dumb at the view that spread before them. (We now extract from the Blackwood's Magazine article, drawn up by Colonel Fawcett from material contained in a document left by the Portuguese explorer of over two centuries ago. {Manuscript No. 512, Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janiero.})

* * *

In the immediate foreground lay extensive plains brilliantly green, with patches here and there of silver water, changing to yellowish brown and dull greens as they drew near the foothills. On this was a sight that made the adventurers gasp and hastily draw back behind the crest-line. For, at a distance of some three or four miles, and so clear that buildings could be distinctly made out, was a huge city ... Nothing could have been more unexpected than this extraordinary sight ... The sun was well up, for it was scarcely past mid-day, and it was decided that two Portuguese and two Negroes, all well armed, should reconnoiter as near the city as possible and discover what sort of people dwelt in this mysterious place ... The scouts returned. They had not ventured too near the city, but from a distant point of vantage had observed neither inhabitant nor smoke.

To the Indians it was just as mysterious as to their more civilized companions. They had vague traditions and very definite superstitions regarding this part of the country which had kept it 'tabu,' and they were fearful of they knew not what. One man was found, however, who volunteered to go alone and discover what there was. He started early next morning and returned about noon, obviously frightened, but asserting that there existed not a trace of living man.

On the following morning the whole party set off cautiously along the trail, an advance guard of four scouts preceding them by about half a mile. Drawing near the city the scouts rejoined the main body, corroborating the Indian's account that there was no sign of human life. The whole party thereupon came into the open, and, disposed in strategic order, approached the walls.

The trail led directly to an entrance through three lofty arches built of gigantic stones, the middle arch towering above the others. The stupendous masonry was black with age, and the grandeur of the architecture tied every man's tongue ... The overwhelming dignity of the design, the awesome silence and mystery of an old abandoned city possessed them, rough men as they were. High above the crown of the central arch, and deeply engraved into the weathered stone, were characters of some sort. They knew enough to realize that this was no familiar script. The arches were in a good state of preservation, but a few huge blocks had fallen from the summit, and portions had slipped somewhat out of plumb. Passing through the archway they found themselves in a wide street, littered with fallen masonry and broken pillars. They gazed in amazement. There was not a sign of human occupation. It was all incredibly old, and yet in its age amazingly perfect. Here were two-storied houses on either side, all built up of carefully squared blocks carved in elaborate time-worn designs. In many cases roofs had fallen in, in others great stone slabs still covered the dark interiors, and he who had the temerity to enter the windowless chambers through the narrow doorways and to raise his voice, fled at the echoes hurled at him by the vaulted ceilings and solid walls. Fallen stones and an accumulation of bat droppings covered any vestiges of human occupation, had there been such.

Dumb with amazement, the party, huddled together like a flock of scared sheep, passed down the street into a vast square or plaza. Here they must have "looked at each other with a wild surmise," for in the center of the plaza, dominating its surroundings in sublime majesty, was a gigantic black stone column set upon a plinth of the same rock, and upon it the statue of a man, one hand on his hip, the other arm extended with the index finger pointing towards the north -- magnificent in design, perfect in preservation. In each corner of the plaza had been great obelisks of black stone covered with carvings. Three of them had been broken off short, the upper parts lying on the ground prominent amidst the litter of stone. The whole of the right hand side of the plaza was occupied by a building so magnificent in its design as to have been obviously a palace, its square columns intact, but walls and roof partly demolished. A vast entrance hall was approached by a broad flight of steps, much of which was displaced. The interior of this hall was rich in exquisite carving, and still showed signs of a brilliance of colouring comparable with some of the finest relics of Egypt. The interior exit from this hall was blocked by fallen masonry ... At the junction of the street with the plaza, above what appeared to be the principal entrance, was carved in semi-relief the figure of a youth in excellent preservation. The figure was naked from the waist up, had shield in hand and a band across the shoulder. The face was clean-shaven and the head crowned with a wreath of laurel ...

In the plaza opposite the palace was the ruin of another huge edifice, evidently a temple by its magnificent façade and general appearance. It was entirely unroofed, but on the weather-worn walls were still to be traced figures and designs of animals and birds ... Beyond the street and plaza the city seemed to be entirely in ruin, and much of it was buried. Gaping chasms in the ground, into whose fathomless depths a stone dropped without sound, left no doubt as to the agency of destruction. Around these dreadful gulfs great blocks of stone elaborately carved, slabs of rock, portions of stone and broken columns were piled in awful confusion. The explorers could imagine something of the ghastly tragedy of this unknown cataclysm, whose resistless force had displaced and thrown down monolithic stones of fifty tons and upwards and destroyed in less perhaps than one fearful minute the civilization of a thousand years.

On the far side of the plaza the city was open to a river some thirty yards or so in width ... Evidently there had been a highly decorative terrace to this river, but most of it had been swallowed up or lay beneath the waters ... About a quarter of a mile outside the city and standing by itself was a palatial building with a front of 250 paces, approached by a broad flight of steps of many-coloured stones. It was heavily columned all round, and the noble portico opened upon a vast hall, whose mural decorations and gorgeous colouring still remained more or less intact. From this hall opened fifteen smaller chambers, in each of which was the carved head of a serpent from whose opened jaws poured a small stream of water ...

It was long before they could tear themselves away from these awesome ruins, for whose existence they could imagine no explanation. The grandeur and opulence of the place astounded them, but this feeling soon gave place to an intense lust for treasure, inevitable amongst ignorant men. If they could have filled their pockets with gold, they would willingly have destroyed every stone of this priceless relic of a lost civilisation. Their report reeks of this impulse. It is the buried wealth which attracts them, not the mystery ... The leader of the expedition was anxious to return better equipped for this purpose.

Having no notion where he was, but with every confidence that those Indians who remained with him would remember the country, the leader decided to follow the river down on a chance of striking some civilised settlement ... Soon after the departure of this party he found to the east of the fall unmistakable signs of mining. Shafts whose depths he had no means of plumbing excited his curiosity. On the surface of the ground were specimens of silver ore of great richness, presumably brought up from these shafts, encouraging him to believe that he had really discovered the lost mines of Moribeca. Further investigation revealed other features of interest. There were caverns hewn out of the solid rock, one of them sealed with a grey slab of stone ... No effort, however, could move the slab. Others were similarly closed ... Possibly they were the tombs of the priests and kings of the city. The party pictured themselves as rich men. They agreed that, excepting to the Viceroy, to whom their leader owed a debt of gratitude, they would say nothing, but return reconstituted, unearth the treasures and work the mines ...

In the meantime the scouting section, after following the lower river for nine days without result, caught sight in a backwater of a canoe paddled by two white people with long black hair and dressed in clothing of some sort. But on firing a shot to attract attention, the canoe spurted ahead and disappeared. People of this appearance were reported again and again by Portuguese explorers up to about half a century ago, but no explanation has ever been vouchsafed ... The leader then decided to march eastward through the forest and leave it to chance what part of the Atlantic coast settlements he eventually struck. Where he ultimately came out he does not say ...

Whether the Indians deserted him from fear of the tabu and he lost himself, as so many did in these vast solitudes, or whether the insatiable greed of these early explorers ended in quarrels and tragedy, is unknown. Neither he nor a single member of his party were heard of again ...

Meanwhile the Viceroy pigeon-holed the report, which never saw light again for upwards of half a century. The Government made some half-hearted attempts to find the place about the middle of the nineteenth century, but they failed to discover anything, and, truth to tell, the search was not conducted very intelligently ...

Is the investigation worth while from a scientific point of view? Assuredly, yes. It must be doubtful if there is any archaeological and ethnological research more important today than the study of these ruins and the relics contained therein ... What is the significance of the hundreds of inscriptions scattered throughout the forests in characters resembling some of those contained amongst the oldest scripts known to us elsewhere, themselves as yet a mystery? May there not be somewhere another Rosetta stone? Who can estimate the value of such a discovery of ruins compared with which those in Egypt are modern?

* * *

Were the legend of Matto Grosso the only one of its kind, the whole affair might be brushed aside as a fancy, but similar traditions prevail in other parts of the world. Readers of THEOSOPHY will recall, for example, the North American Indian tradition of the "mountain of mystery" in Arizona, as related in an article titled "The Spirits of Superstition Mountain (THEOSOPHY 24: 504-8). Also, the story of a mysterious city in the Cordilleras was told to Stephens by a Spanish Padre in 1838-9,(1) which the priest swore that he had seen with his own eyes, and which the traveller firmly believed to be true:

The Padre of the little village near the ruins of Santa Cruz del Quiche, had heard of the unknown city at the village of Chajul ... He was then young, and climbed with much labor to the naked summit of the topmost ridge of the sierra of the Cordillera. When arrived at a height of ten or twelve thousand feet, he looked over an immense plain extending to Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico, and saw, at a great distance, a large city spread over a great space, and with turrets white and glittering in the sun. Tradition says that no white man has ever reached this city; that the inhabitants speak the Maya language, know that strangers have conquered their whole land, and murder any white man who attempts to enter their territory....

A story almost identical with the above was told to H. P. Blavatsky by an old native priest of Peru, whom she met there. Ostensibly a converted native missionary, the priest assured her that he was at heart as much a sun-worshipper as ever, and kept up his friendly relations with the conquerors and the Catholic religion for the sake of his people. He solemnly affirmed that he had been at Santa Cruz, and had visited the mysterious city, which he entered by a "subterranean passage" unknown to the world at large.

Relics of ancient civilizations have been unearthed in every part of the globe, and more, doubtless, await the day when some open-minded and intuitive archaeologist will come upon their meaning. Meantime, words written by H. P. Blavatsky, in 1880, may provide food for thought for students:

...all along the coast of Peru, all over the Isthmus of North America, in the canyons of the Cordilleras, in the impassable gorges of the Andes, and, especially beyond the valley of Mexico, lie, ruined and desolate, hundreds of once mighty cities, lost to the memory of men, and having themselves lost even a name. Buried in dense forests, entombed in inaccessible valleys, sometimes sixty feet underground, from the day of their discovery until now they have ever remained a riddle to science, baffling all inquiry, and they have been muter than the Egyptian Sphinx herself ... Of the long generations of people who built them, history knows nothing, and even tradition is silent. As a matter of course, most of these lithic remains are covered with a dense vegetation. Whole forests have grown out of the broken hearts of the cities, and, with few exceptions, every thing is in ruin. But one may judge of what once was by that which yet remains.

Having well defined ideas as to the periodicity of cycles, for the world as well as for nations, empires, and tribes, we are convinced that our present modern civilization is but the latest dawn of that which already has been seen an innumerable number of times upon this planet.

"Who knows, then," wrote Dr. Heath, of Kansas City, in his Peruvian Antiquities, "but that Jules Verne's fanciful idea regarding the lost continent Atlanta may be near the truth? Who can say that, where now is the Atlantic Ocean, formerly did not exist a continent, with its dense population, advanced in the arts and sciences, who, as they found their land sinking beneath the waters, retired part east and part west, populating thus the two hemispheres?"

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